Kamrooz Aram
Kamrooz Aram’s holistic approach to artmaking integrates sculpture, painting, and architecture, creating a context for viewing cultural artifacts anew that brings them back into the circulation of our vibrating, living present.
In his collage series, Variations on Turquoise Bowl, 2025, for example, a photographic reproduction depicts a turquoise ceramic bowl, on which a painted central figure plays a lute, while, fringing the figure, an audience of figures appears in cloud-like vignettes composed of freehand lines. The photo is in turn framed by a painted square which is rimmed with a thin red pencil line, drawn with alacrity. Beyond the red line appears an open linen surface. Aram systematically isolates a color from within the photo reproductions, and in each instance, paints the square border to match it. The color of the photograph will be survived by the painted square as the printed book page will fade more quickly over time. The relative vibrancy of the paint over the reproduction speaks to the primacy of the bowl, while it alludes to the exhaustion of the larger colonialist rubric from which follow museums and acquisitions and, only eventually, the object itself, trafficked alongside other antiquities in the museum halls. The series also cleverly nods to Joseph Albers’ Homage to the Square. We realize that in Aram’s compact framing device he has diagrammed a whole system not only of formal and color relations, but of the cultural scripts and power imbalances that produced these photo-derivatives.
Panning out to the gallery space, which includes a series of sculpture-painting hybrids in the show, we see how Aram activates walls, floors, creating scrims, pedestals and spatial color programs. His final dramaturgy is the orchestration of art with the built environment surrounding it, in dialogue with histories of modernism that have been pitted against Eastern aesthetic traditions. The exposed seams of a sheetrock wall, the pale greens and pinks of the construction materials dialogue with the paintings hanging, zigzagging on the floor and extruded from the wall. A set of relational practices reverberate in the space, organized by color, memory, time. There is a reciprocity between each element in this system of relations. Call it interdependence or kinship; call it an incantatory solidarity.
-Cora Fisher